Ziggma Review – The Pros And Cons Of This Platform

About Ziggma

Ziggma is an affordable platform for finding new investment ideas and managing your portfolio. It’s fairly easy to use, offering algorithm-based scores to help you find and analyze top-performing stocks. Ziggma is built primarily around fundamental analysis, so it’s best suited for investors with a time horizon of several months to several years.

In our Ziggma review, we’ll take a closer look at this platform to help you decide if it’s right for you.

Ziggma Pricing Options

Ziggma offers a free plan that includes most of its portfolio management features, stock screener, and stock scores. If you want access to a list of top-scoring stocks, the portfolio simulator, or backtesting tools, you’ll need to upgrade to the Premium plan. A Premium subscription costs $9.90 per month or $89 per year.

Ziggma Features

Ziggma Score

One of the main features that Ziggma offers is its algorithm-based stock scores. Ziggma uses 32 fundamental financial metrics to give each stock a score from 0-100 across 4 categories: growth, profitability, valuation, and financial position within its industry. Each stock is also assigned an overall score.

This scoring system seems to work. From 2011 to 2020, a portfolio of stocks with Ziggma scores in the top 10% of their respective industries produced a return of 404% compared to 176% for the S&P 500 over the same time period.

Stocks’ overall Ziggma scores are available to all users, including free users. However, you must upgrade to a Premium subscription to see category scores and to see how a stock compares to competitors in its industry.

Ziggma also keeps an up-to-date list of the top 5 highest-scoring stocks across the 10 fastest-growing industries (based on projected revenue growth). This offers a quick, simple way to find stocks that might be worth adding to your portfolio.

Stock Analysis

Ziggma offers analysis of all US companies with a market cap greater than $100 million. Each stock has its own profile page where you can see its Ziggma scores, analysts’ consensus price target, and basic charts for key fundamental indicators. You can also dive into a peer comparison, which lets you compare metrics like P/E, EPS growth, recent performance, and Ziggma category scores.

Perhaps the best part of Ziggma’s stock pages is the pros and cons list. This offers a brief, easy-to-understand summary of the metrics that a stock is performing well on and the metrics it’s falling behind on. These strengths and weaknesses are determined algorithmically, so use them as a starting point for research rather than a forecast.

Stock Screener

Ziggma offers a relatively basic stock screener that lets you filter stocks based on financial metrics, Ziggma scores, and industry. You can save custom screens, and the platform offers built-in screeners for different industries and growth scenarios. 

We’ve reviewed a lot of different stock screeners, and most of them have similar functionality. The “unique” value of a screener comes down to the criteria that can be used to create screens. Ziggma offers unique screen filters for:

Ziggma Score (Overall)

Ziggma Score by Category (Valuation, Growth, Profitability, and Financial Position)

Climate Score

Investors who value Ziggma’s proprietary metrics will get the most value out of this screener.

Portfolio Tools

Portfolio management is another major aspect of Ziggma. The platform makes it easy to import a virtual portfolio from most brokers using Plaid, although you can’t place orders directly from Ziggma. You can also import watchlists from Yahoo! Finance. There’s no limit to the number of portfolios and watchlists you can have, even with a free account.

A portfolio overview lets you easily monitor the performance, Ziggma scores, and weight of each stock in your portfolio. You can dig in further with charts showing how your portfolio is diversified across sectors, companies, and Ziggma score tiers. The platform also offers tables to give you a quick overview of your holdings in terms of key fundamental and technical indicators.

Ziggma also offers a portfolio simulator for Premium subscribers. With this tool, you can see how some key aspects of your portfolio will change if you execute a trade of a certain size. For example, Ziggma shows how your portfolio’s average P/E and EPS growth will change. However, you can’t break this simulation down by industry unless you create a new sub-portfolio, so it’s not as useful as it could be.

Guru & Model Portfolios

For investors looking to generate ideas and/or model the portfolios of other successful investors, Ziggma offers access to “Guru Portfolios” and “Model Portfolios.”

Guru Portfolios are portfolios of well-known investors and hedge funds.

Model Portfolios are portfolios based on specific investing themes, such as:

Value Investing

Sustainable Investing (quite a few options based on climate impact and sustainability)

REITs Investing

And more

After selecting any of the Model Portfolios or Guru Portfolios to analyze, you will be shown the specific stocks in that portfolio, as well as some key metrics and ratings. Key metrics include:

Portfolio Performance

Dividend Yield

Profit/Revenue Growth

Ziggma Scores

And more.

There are a lot of research tools that help investors dig deeper into the data. These portfolios serve as a great starting point for investors looking to generate ideas. For example, dividend investors may open a model portfolio and look for the best-yielding dividend stocks, whereas growth investors may open that same portfolio and look for the stocks with the highest income growth.

Smart Alerts

Ziggma allows investors to set “Smart Alerts” for the stocks they follow.

Alerts can be set for:

Price

Price/Earnings (P/E)

Beta

Volatility

RSI

MACD

These alerts can be used to get buy/sell alerts based on your initial investment thesis.

I found the “P/E” alert to be particularly beneficial. For example, assume you are a value investor who invested in a stock because (among other reasons) it had a P/E score of 10 in an industry where the average P/E is 15. Since you purchased the stock because you believed it was undervalued, you may want to consider selling when the stock approaches fair value. ZIggma allows you to set a P/E alert so you can be prepared to sell when the stock approaches its fair value. Similarly, you may like a company but consider it to be overvalued. In this case, you could set an alert to trigger when the stock enters a fair value range (based on P/E).

The same logic can be applied to the other smart alerts as well.

KPI Tracking

For metrics where “smart alerts” are not available, Ziggma has another feature that may be able to help – KPI tracking.

This feature is available under the “Fundamental” section of the portfolio tool.

The KPI tracking feature allows investors to keep track of the change in KPIs from the time they added a position until now.

In the screenshot below, you can see the current KPI as well as the original KPI (highlighted in yellow).

The value of this feature shouldn’t be understated, especially for research-driven investors who manage bigger portfolios.

KPI tracking helps you differentiate a company’s current standing from its standing at the time you decided to invest. For example, assume you decided to invest in a growth stock when revenue growth was 100% year-over-year. You may no longer be interested in that stock as revenue growth declines to 5%.

Of course, these metrics can be tracked manually with most tools, however this process becomes difficult to manage with a larger portfolio of stocks over a long period of time. For example, if you purchase 25 new stocks this year, are you going to remember the exact investment thesis for each one in a few years? Even if you did, the KPI tracking tool makes the re-analysis process much simpler.

Backtesting

Premium users get access to a simple backtesting tool that models the value of your portfolio if you were to invest in it wholesale on a specific date in the past.

We found this tool to be underwhelming since it doesn’t provide any actionable information about whether a specific investment strategy is working or not. The backtesting module doesn’t offer information about how the value of your portfolio changed over the course of the simulation or about what individual holdings over-or under-performed. It also doesn’t show you how the simulated performance compares to your portfolio’s actual performance.

Compatible Brokerages

Ziggma uses Plaid to connect with most major brokerages, including Robinhood, Merrill, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Stash. You can also import portfolio data from a CSV or from Yahoo! Finance.

Platform Differentiators

Ziggma makes it easy to find new stocks to invest in, thanks to its algorithmic scoring system. The platform’s stock profile pages also do a good job of summarizing financial information, although most of the analysis is algorithm-generated rather than based on human analysis. The portfolio management tools also do a nice job of helping your track your performance, especially if you have accounts at multiple brokers.

Standout features include:

KPI Tracking

Guru/Model Portfolios for Idea Generation

Smart Alerts

Portfolio Analysis Tools

What Type of Trader is Ziggma Best For?

Ziggma is best suited for the following types of investors:

Medium to long-term investment horizon

Research-driven

Managing large portfolios (i.e. 15+ stocks)

While the platform offers a lot of great tools to help investors discover new ideas, the real value comes from the portfolio management tools.

Ziggma provides the tools you need to track the health of your portfolio over time. You can keep track of news, key portfolio metrics, performance, and changes to key fundamental metrics for the stocks in your portfolio. At $89/year the service is very fairly priced and likely to pay for itself with a few great insights.

Pros

Free portfolio management tools with broker integrations

Stock scoring system based on fundamental metrics

Compare stocks across industry peers

Top 50 stocks list to generate investment ideas

KPI tracking feature is unique and insightful.

Very easy to use

Fairly priced

Cons

Backtesting and simulation features lack depth

Stock screener has relatively few filter parameters